Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

‘I suppose it makes sense,’ I offered. ‘All that forward planning. Something like this needs to resemble reality, if it’s to work at all.’

‘Yes and no.’

‘What does that mean?’

He gestured towards the bright space in front of us. ‘There are multiple reasons to film a reconstruction.’

I waited for him to elaborate on this.

‘Jogging memories is only part of the plan,’ he said. ‘After all this time, it’s unlikely anyone remembers anything new.’

‘Then why do it?’ I frowned, trying to understand. The crowd buzzed around me, busy as bees with their bulky, shiny equipment. ‘It looks expensive.’

‘Because there’s always the hope that someone who does know what happened – either the abductor themselves, or someone else who perhaps suspected them or even shielded them – will have their conscience pricked and come forward.’

I thought about this for a second or two. ‘Could someone like that have a conscience?’

‘Probably not. But it’s worth a go. These things -’ he gestured towards the set, taking in the working men barking monosyllabic commands to one another, the lights, ‘these kinds of crimes – they invite you to be part of the story. Someone who is already part of the story might be tempted to get swept further into it.’ He nodded towards the police liaison, Pete. ‘This is why they do them. A re-enactment is very psychologically powerful – it puts incredible pressure on people who have information, and it motivates others to interrogate their own experiences.’

I nodded, as though I understood.

At the far end of the corridor, near the lintels of a set of fire doors, a nurse accompanied a very sallow, very drained man curled into a small ball in a wheelchair. His hair was a smoke of thin grey, curled up in disordered shapes; from the neck down he was covered by a bright orange blanket. He was being pushed by an orderly, who was chatting to the nurse who giggled back, both appearing to be utterly unconscious of all the unusual activity around them, yet both betrayed themselves as utterly captivated by it. I heard the whispered words, ‘It’s a Crimewatch thing, for some old missing persons case,’ from the nurse.

Martin was on to something, I realized.

The crew stepped out of the way with bad grace as the small group approached, and as he passed me, on his way into the ward on the left, I heard the old man whisper in a small, mucus-cracked voice, ‘I’m ready for my close-up,’ and then, with a swift, surprising vitality, he offered me a bawdy wink and smile.

I smiled back, amused and charmed.

‘Look at you. Already flirting,’ said Martin. There was warmth in his voice. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

He led me gingerly past the men setting up equipment to one of the stairwells, where one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen was deep in conversation with a blond man. The girl had long dark hair and an exquisitely fine complexion, which, now that I looked, I realized was the result of several layers of expertly applied make-up. She wore a school shirt and skirt, purple V-necked pullover with a grey stripe trim, black tights and ugly shoes. Her plain brown mascara had been lightly oiled, as though to suggest tears.

‘This is Thea, who’s playing Bethan,’ Martin said as we drew near. ‘And this gentleman is Roddy, who’s going to be Alex.’

Roddy was in nondescript jeans and jacket. I realized that in her letters Bethan had never offered much information on how he dressed.

The pair acknowledged us with distant little smiles, but did not pause in their urgent conversation, which appeared to be about regional accents.

‘So, Ian says go neutral,’ said Thea, in an achingly upper-middle-class actressy voice, ‘but I’m thinking that since her family was a bit Jeremy Kyle Show I should do something more Normal for Norfolk,’ then the pair of them burst into tinkling, affected laughter.

A sharp little stab of dislike shot through me.

Martin squeezed my shoulder. ‘Drama students, eh?’ he whispered to me. ‘Shall we find a seat and wait for the show?’

The morning passed in a kind of constantly interrupted tedium, as nothing much happened, but it kept having to be halted while staff and patients moved through the corridor on their business. Again and again, the scene reset as extras dressed as nurses, doctors and visitors ambled up and down the corridor, while Thea and Roddy marched towards us, a rolling camera preceding them, Roddy walking swiftly about ten feet behind Thea, while she stumbled and wiped at her face in distress.

Then there were a few takes of them talking while people passed them by. In a few they argued; in a few he appealed to her, one hand curled around her arm possessively; in one he grabbed her, holding her close, the implication clearly being that he had a weapon tucked against her belly or back and was frog-marching her discreetly out of the building.

‘I need to go to the loo,’ I murmured to Martin. ‘Be right back.’

It took me about five minutes to find the ladies’, and I felt chilled, queasy that someone could just grab a girl like that. It could happen to anyone. Alone in the toilets, I fell prey to a slippery spurt of paranoia, and quickly splashed my face with cold water, keen to return to the safety of the herd. My heart pounded beneath my jacket.

When I threw open the doors, Martin was waiting for me.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

‘Are you all right? You looked pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It was just a little upsetting to watch. It felt so…’

‘Visceral,’ he supplied. ‘When you see it like that, it becomes so much less abstract. You see how it works. What happens to people.’

I gazed back up at him. He was standing very close.

‘Yes. Exactly. Visceral.’

For a moment I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I wanted him to, in the worst way – I wanted to be enfolded by him, to rest my head against that muscular chest, to set this burden down. I could feel myself starting to grow flexible, limp, waiting for his touch…

But it didn’t come. I stole a quick glance at him, at the peculiar way he had frozen, as though stopping himself.

We both cast our eyes down, pretending that each had not seen the other’s reaction, though my flush must have been apparent, as was his.

Of course he shouldn’t be hugging me, or encouraging me, I reminded myself stiffly. He knew things about me. I was not a suitable girl.

‘Come on,’ he said, with a warm, only slightly stilted, tug of my arm. ‘It’s time for your close-up, Mrs Lewis.’

Today must be Sunday, because Katie has been allowed out of the cellar room and up into the lounge for the evening, with its patterned blue rug covering the wooden floor, and the old-fashioned fireside chairs, built of black studded wood on a monumental scale, and the low couch with its deep cushions. The news is on, and an earnest man in a suit is on television talking about some company that has either lost millions of pounds or lied about having it in the first place. Her hands are clasped around a chipped mug of thin hot chocolate. She’s enjoying its heat far more than its taste.

She’s sitting next to him on the couch, and the sense of stuffing and cushions is strange after days of incarceration. The patterned silk is slippery against the backs of her legs.

Outside brisk autumnal winds thump against the windows, making low moans as they rattle through the rotting frames, the draft raising the light hairs on her arms into goose pimples, stirring the brown leaves on the trees shading the house into a crackly susurrus.

He is watching the television but she can sense his boredom, and his hand reaches out and casually begins to stroke the back of her neck. She stiffens, as she always does.